Failure of the year

This is perhaps one of the worst things I've ever endeavored to write recently. I never finished it because I kept revising and making it worse before I made any progress at all. It might be funny to someone. It's just embarrassing to me.


Hami Rothchild started his day with a piece of toast upon which he spread a 1.3 centimeter thick square of butter. Hami’s first thoughts on this particular morning were of God and his earthly son, Flarmy Periwinkle. Hami had devoted himself to Flarmy’s teachings for four dozen years and he thought it finally time to carry out the Flarmyst pilgrimage as written in the Flarmyst holy book, the Garble. He hadn’t read the Garble because he never could understand Garblical poetry, but he had been told by Flarmyst Bloggerwinkles that the Pilgrimage involved taking his firstborn son to the top of the Yaddlihoo’s prow and whispering the first four books of the Garble into his ear during a heavy storm. But now was not the time for Flarmycy, Hami thought as he looked at the idle knife and toast before him, now was the time for buttered toast. Tomorrow— yes, tomorrow he would make plans for his pilgrimage.
As he resumed the work of spreading the butter upon his whole wheat toast he thought of his eldest son, Hari. Hari was a boy of no particular talents, but there was a sort of calculated grace in his stride that made him almost godlike, Hami thought. Of course, it was certainly true what his deceased wife had said of Hari, that the kid had “spunk, no motivation, destined for failure,” but there was something about the boy that had always made Hami light up whenever the boy was in his presence. Hami was certain that the Pilgrimage to the Yadlihoo would awaken in Hari that which had been missing. “Who knows,” thought Hami, “perhaps my little Hari will be the next Periwinkle!”
Hami returned again from his Flarmyst daze to his toast. He sat in a lazily constructed folding metal chair, a product of the Taiwan-based American company, Bolognial – the owner of the company, one Christian Bassi, had named it thus because it was his greatest belief that the reason for America’s great success was entirely due to the invention of bologna, which furthermore he believed was the work of a genius American entrepreneur such as himself; sadly, Christian was completely ignorant of the fact that Bologna was named after mortadella, a meat famous in the Italian city of Bologna from which Christian’s ancestors hailed – and he thought again of Hari. This time, however, he began to brood darkly on Hari.
Hami leaned over his thin and slightly radioactive ceramic plate—also of Bolognial manufacture—to bite into his buttered toast. As he continued to think of Hari, an almost inconceivably small drop of saliva fell on a rivet from his Bolognial chair. His mouth neared the toast’s crispy crust as he thought of Hari and the lubricated rivet shot from its house and launched itself out of Hami’s third story window. It then bounced off a fire hydrant in front of Hami’s apartment complex and came to a sudden rest between the radiator fan and its housing of Billy Singh’s taxi, causing Billy Singh to pull off the road and Hami to fall awkwardly to the floor with his toast fitting him now like a slightly buttery glove. Both men cursed simultaneously.
At that precise moment, Dromi Rothchild, the youngest of Hami’s sons, walked into the kitchen and laughed.
“Hey Hari, come check dad out!” Dromi yelled.
Hari sat up in his twin bed. It was noon, meaning that Hari had already missed three of his classes at the university. The clothes hanging from his closet doorknob, on the bookcase whose books were tomes of dust, and on the floor were like casualties of the bubonic plague; here a shirt stretched its sleeve as if gasping for its last breath; here a pair of jeans pocked by bubos rest like a pair of legs collapsed under the weight of a fatigued body; and over there, beside the dusty guitar, lay a hat smelling of rotting flesh.
In the apartment next to Sami’s a crisis was occurring. Tess Ball bumped her hip on her low kitchen counter and let out a primal scream. Tears were forming in her eyes as she picked a pillow up off her couch, dropped it, picked it up again, and not being satisfied with whatever it was she was doing, dropped to the floor and peered under her couch. But she would not let the tears break free – no, not Tess Ball! She was strong! She was fierce! She was woman, hear her roar! And she could crush any man underneath her tastefully black and orthopedically smart half-inch heels – that is, if she could find them. But it was Thursday, and Thursdays never were quite right for Tess; last Thursday it was the kid at Starbucks and his inability to correctly produce the thick foam on her latte, the Thursday before that it was that cabbie who wore the weird head thing and the girly metal bracelet frowning at her repeatedly through the rearview mirror, and this week it was her favorite pair of heels.
Despite the fact that they were heels and delightfully comfortable heels at that, Tess cringed every time somebody actually had the gall to refer to them as heels. She hadn’t any better name for them but simply “shoes” but she was irritated none-the-less when people naturally assumed that they were heels and even more so when other women complimented her by saying “nice heels!” and then turned their own feet and looked at their own. But she would never give those bitches the satisfaction of replying with an, “Oh! Thanks! Yours too,” or even an acknowledging shrug. She wasn’t Victoria Beckham, damn it! She was Tess Fucking Ball!